CHAPTER I. WHEN HE WAS A CHILD. ‘Don’t say anything before the boy.’ This was one of the first things he remembered. In the confused recollections of that early age, he seemed to have been always hearing it: said between his mother and his sister, afterwards between his grandparents, even by strangers one to another, always, ‘Don’t say anything before the boy.’ What it was, about which nothing was to be said, he had very little idea, and, indeed, grew up to be a man before, in the light of sudden revelations, he began to put these scattered gleams together, and see what they meant. They confused his little soul from the beginning, throwing strange lights and stranger shadows across his path, keeping around him a sort of unreality, a sense that things were not as they seemed. His name was John in those days: certainly John--of that there was no doubt: called Johnnie, when people were kind, sometimes Jack--but John he always was. He had a faint sort of notion that it had not always been John Sandford. But this was not clear in his mind. It was all confused with the rest of the broken reminiscences which concerned the time in which everybody was so anxious that nothing should be said before the boy. In those days his recollection was of a little common-place house--a house in a street--with two parlours, one behind the other, kitchens below, bed-rooms above, the most ordinary little house. There was a little garden behind, in which he played; and in which sometimes he was vaguely conscious of being shut out on purpose to play, and doing so in an abortive, unwilling way which took all the pleasure out of it. Sometimes he only sat down and wondered, not even pretending to amuse himself, until a butterfly flew past and roused him, or his little spade showed itself temptingly at hand. At seven one is easily beguiled, whatever weight there may be on one’s spirit. But now and then he would stop and look up at the windows, and see some one moving indoors, and wonder again what it was that the boy was not intended to know.